Future Feeders Blog

If you read our latest newsletter you'd know that we're off to Indonesia this week. Yogyakarta to be precise. (If you're wondering how to pronounce that you should click here.)

Joel & Anais have been invited(!) as representatives of the Family Farmers United Network to participate in a three-day workshop on the "Challenges of Supermarket Expansion in Asia" being held by GRAIN. This is an amazing opportunity for us to learn from our Asian counterparts about their struggles and set-backs. We are very excited to be able to share this experience with you and other farmers in whatever way we can on our return.

GRAIN is a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.

The goals of the workshop are• To provide information and training on the relation between the expansion of modern retail and issues such as food sovereignty, free trade and foreign investment, labour rights.• To create regional linkages between different groups and networks with different concerns related to modern retail expansion• To Develop action strategies and highlighting information gaps.

Participants will be attending from across Asia representing national and regional farmers organisations, regional research networks, small scale traders' organisations, labour groups and NGOs.

We set off tomorrow leaving trusty Dane in charge as site manager for the week at FFHQ. You'll be hearing plenty more from us about our adventures and if you have any thoughts on the issue we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a line at farm@futurefeeders.org.

If you would like to learn more about the issue of supermarkets and how they are undermining food sovereignty look no further than this just published report by GRAIN: Food Sovereignty for Sale. GRAIN's Asian coordinatior Kartini Simon has been researching the impacts of supermarket expansion across Asia for the past six months and will be facilitating the upcoming workshop.